James Bond & Friends

The storyy goes that back in the day distribution of domestic copies was more or less balanced. Some opted for BETAMAX (Sony) and some for VHS (JVC). In most cases there were versions on both systems. There was also another system called the 2000 system that allowed users to used the videotapes in two sides (just like a cassette) that was also way better than VHS. What happened was the rise of domestic video players coincide with a fever on sales of porn movies on videotape. Porn producers opted for the VHS system as it was cheaper to produce and to license, and that influenced the end result of the war among domestic videotape systems. Or so we’ve been told since them. Don’t know how accurate that claim really is 😉

There’s also the difference on projection systems. Many exhibitors did not project at the recommended light intensity in order to save money on projection lamps (that still happens nowadays in some places), but if they are projecting the movie with a laser projector it’s a completely different story To summarize the comment, what I’m trying to say here is the level of detail you see on modern projections of old movies has way much more to do with HDR projection (when that is the case) and many other factors rather than with the actual resolution. Hope I’m not boring you to dead with this comment. Thank you so much for the time and effort you dedicate to this podcast. I really appreciate it. Best wishes. (3)

4K is a pretty conservative translation to digital imaging of the human eye accuracy interpreting a 35 mm film negative image. Considering an equivalence of 44 degrees per pixel and the height of such negative, the Digital Cinema Iniciatives consortium (DCI) established this standard (called 4K DCI) as a 4096 x 2160 pixels image. That was meant to represent a “digital translation” of 35 mm negatives. For 65 mm film, other resolutions apply. But the truth is no one ever sees a negative projected. You see a positive that’s the consequence of a series of processes done to the original negative to obtain a master copy, from which another 10 copies were made from where all the main distribution copies were made and so on. Film obviously deteriorates with every projection so the chances are whenever you saw a movie shot in 35 mm in theatres the actual resolution was less than 1K. Hence the clear difference you could appreciate on the 4K version of “You only live twice” (shot on 35 mm Kodak 50 T 5251 stock back in the day) on the big screen recently. (2)

Human perception of moving images is a pretty complex issue and we’re still catching up on many aspects related to it. 4K represent a clear difference in detail perception when seeing still images. But perception of moving images is a whole different thing. We perceive quality of moving images depending heavily on contrast and color information and not that much on resolution. Actually, we’ve been able to measure it accurately and came to the conclusion that at 24 fps the human brain doesn’t appreciate the difference in resolution from 1,8K on. That is, up to IMAX screens with a huge diagonal of more than 70 meters. In those sizes, yes, we can certainly tell the difference but that’s not your usual multiplex screen by any means (1)